Member Meeting “Minutes” 10/6/8

Note from Colin: I’m sorry this took a month to get out. I was psyched about a lot of the ideas we kicked around, particularly about generally promoting bike culture in the area. Of course, if you are excited about helping with any of these projects, please volunteer with us!

Freeride Montpelier Member Meeting Minutes

10.6.8

Attended by 9 members, including the steering committee.

Minutes assembled sloppily by Colin

The agenda of the meeting was loose discussion about Freeride, hopefully to come up with some plans for the winter and beginning of next year. This is a hodgepodge of notes following some of the basic ideas in the conversation:

- Visibility remains a problem, including physically being able to find the shop. A bright sandwich board with an arrow was suggested.

- Part of our mission is “promoting bicycling in Montpelier and surrounding communities”. How can we be doing this beyond providing space and education through service during shifts?

• Rides, classes, starting a ride contact list, posters/flyers…
• Improving our bike hauling capability towards showing what is possible
• Promotional videos such as how to get to Freeride and some basic tutorials for bike work or Montpelier-specific riding. It was mentioned that we may be able to use a bike-mounted camera from the schools, and that Onion River Community Access (ORCA) offer the use of video/editing equipment to nonprofits, and that there are digital video tutorials on the web.
• Focusing on bike culture vs. car culture, changing the norm with a growing movement and increasing numbers.

- Freeride has been relying on volunteers to do organizational work as well as staff the shop or take on random tasks. We talked about volunteer recruitment, how to bring people in. It was mentioned that when most people first start to volunteer, it is helpful to have very specific tasks that they can choose to take on, with plenty of support. We also realized that few people have been volunteering for regular shifts, and decided to encourage people to do this in order to learn mechanics and perhaps be able to take on a shift of their own in the future.

- We discussed bike safety for a while, and came up with ideas of how Freeride might promote bike safety. It was mentioned that we are saving up funds to make a helmet order, anticipated next spring/summer. Here are some of the ideas:

• Safety/rules of the road workshops. They could also be small parts of other workshops. A volunteer could assemble information about the existing workshops that other organizations are putting on to be advertised by Freeride.
• A volunteer could do research on bike safety and assemble a resource manual for the shop/website, or tags for the bikes we sell (such as 5-7 biggest “watch out for this” tips)
• We could analyze what went wrong in the stories of real bike accidents. One of our members works at the Berlin hospital and may be able to get information on these cases.